On September 28th, Allen Dick wrote:
 
 
<This sounds like real work!  Not only does one have to have enough hives
<to compare, but he has to manage them to make honey, while carefully
<measuring results.
 
<We have tried to do a bit of this, but a lot of the time I am not sure if
<it is the queen or the position in the yard, etc.  And if it is the queen,
<is it her age, her upbringing, the particular batch of sperm she is
<processing at the moment, or is it her own genetics?  I must confess to
<not having the patience to keep the kind of records necessary to come to
<valid conclusions.
(...)
 
<We simply haven't had the dedication to evaluate the progeny beyond
<observing that they are average or better in most regards.  We simply are
<trying to mimic nature by removing - as much as easily manageble - the
<less successful hives from the active breeding pool and encouraging
<breeding by fairly large number of the most successful.
 
<I'd be interested in understanding (visualising) how you manage to do the
<measurements.  Do you do it once a year - or more often?  Do you have a
<hive numbering system?  And how many hives are you evaluating for
<breeding?
 
<Are there some simple tricks and short cuts, or is it just a matter of doing
<the work?
 
A selection program cannot be envisioned the same way wether you are a honey
producer and raise your own queens or if your specialize in commercial queen
production and sell many thousand queens in a season.  I think very few honey
producers invest as much as you do in selection.  I do not think progeny testing
applies to your situation.  You have to do progeny testing if you want to go
into mass production and if you want to have a high degree of confidence
concerning the quality of the queens you sell.  Anybody raising his own queens
in under another important constraint:  he must avoid inbreeding.  He must raise
queens from many breeders in order not to loose the important sex alleles.  I am
under the same constraint when I requeen my own hives.  This is why I raise my
queens from 15 different breeders every years.  A certain proportion of my own
queens being two years old, I always have over 20 different lines represented in
my different yards.  The progeny tests are for the queens I sell, not for the
ones I use... unfortunately.
 
I operate my selection on 400 of my 550 colonies.  Each hive is numbered and I
keep individual records for each queen. I do a systematic evaluation for only 4
criteriae.  I need 4 or 5 rounds of all my hives to complete the evaluation for
all these criteriae.  There is no real shortcut.  I started this year using a
laptop computer. The data is entered directly in the computer from the field.
This saves me a lot of time and my database is alway up to date and ready to
yield compilations and analysis.
 
 use 150 of my 550 colonies to populate my 1600 mating nucs.  200 colonies
produce honey on the first crop.  100 of them are kept near home, where my
queens are mated (isolated area), to provide drones.  These have 2 years old
queens that have proven to be very good after one ful year of test.  200
colonies are sold as nucs in may after participating in the selection to a
certain extent.  I make most of my splits early, wich allows me to test all of
these colonies for brood viability and some of them for honey production on the
fall crop during the same year.
 
My main selection criteriae are the following:
 
-  BROOD VIABILITY AND CHALKBROOD RESISTANCE
-  HONEY PRODUCTION
-  WINTERING ABILITY
-  SWARMING BEHAVIOUR
 
My customers are commercial honey producers.  They are concerned by producing
good crops with as little work as possible.  This is what motivated the choice
of these criteriae.  I want to further develop the testing of disease resistance
trough cleaning behaviour.  I tried this year a certain testing procedure I am
not very happy with.  I want to come back on this point in a future message.
Maybe somebody can help me on this.  Any bad tempered colony is simply rejected.
 
BROOD VIABILITY AND CHALKBROOD RESISTANCE
This criteria is important since it is closely related with the vigour of the
colony according to my observations.  It shows the level of inbreeding of the
queen as well as the laying ability, as well as the resistance to brood disease
to a certain extent.  This evaluation is performed in august on all the queens
introduced during the season.   I use a piece of clear plexiglass with a
parallelogram (containing 100 cells) drawn on it as a mask to count empty cells
in the capped brood.  I take 3 readings on 3 different frames, make the average
and rate on 100.   If chalkbrood is present it is noted at the same time.
 
HONEY PRODUCTION
This is the most important criteria.  This trait is very consistent.  A colonie
giving a good crop on the clover gives also a good crop on the goldenrod flow.
I evaluate all the nucs that were made early on the goldenrod crop on their
first seson.  The next spring I evaluate the performance of all the colonies
left after selling my nucs at the end of the dandelion flow.  The clover flow is
the real test.  Usually it confirms the previous observations.  The evaluation
is done by weighing by hand all the supers ans the second brood chamber.  I
recognize that I cannot obtain precise figures that way, but the good and
superion queens really show up.  Each colony is rated on 100 from a comparison
with the average performance of the yard.  I would like to imporve the accuracy
of the evaluation of this trait since it is so important.  Anybody has a
suggestion beside weighing each hive by hand?  Tibor Szabo has a good method.
He uses a scale attached to a boom and lifts the individuals hives to obrain the
readings.  (I do not have a boom unfortunately).
 
WINTERING ABILITY
This is just done by evaluating the size of the cluster in April.   I just count
the number of frames occupied by the bees.  This is an important criteria in a
country like Canada.
 
SWARMING BEHAVIOUR
Any hive showing a swarming tendency is withdrawn from the selection.  All the
hives are checked for swarming in the first days of June at the same time I
evaluate the dandelion crop.
 
All these figures serve to rank the individual queens and to identify the best
performers on all aspects.  These are used as breeders to establish new lines.
Each breeder is kept as a potential commercial breeder.  These  figures are also
used to establish average ratings for each line for each criteria.  The results
tell me wich breeders of the previous year can safely become a commercial
breeder.  Unfortunately a commercial breeder starts its career on its third year
of life only.
 
This is a lot of work.  It cost me a lot of money in terms of labour.  But I
enjoy doing it and I am convinced it is a very profitable investment for a
business like mine.  I have some qualified help to do  the numerous other tasks.
 
 
Allen, your question sure required a long answer.  More to come on the age of
grafting and on... what else did you want to know?
 
Jean-Pierre Chapleau
1282, rang 8, St-adrien
Quebec,  Canada,
(819)-828-3396
73642.244.compuserve.com